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  Duncan had pulled her out in the middle of the crowd as if to discourage her refusal.

  It worked.

  If she walked off now, she’d cause a minor scene. That was not something she would have wanted to be remembered for, especially since this was a Cavanaugh wedding and she was, after all, very much the outsider despite how friendly everyone was being. They all knew each other. She just knew Duncan—and Brian, the chief of d’s, but strictly by sight.

  The expression in her partner’s eyes as he lowered them to hers said he wasn’t buying into her protest.

  “Funny, your feet haven’t gotten that message.” He pretended to look down at them now as if to check. “Sure looks like dancing to me. C’mon, O’Banyon, loosen up a little. Let yourself go,” he urged. “That’s what these kinds of gatherings are for, you know. To knock off some steam.”

  “I thought it was to celebrate your brother’s wedding,” she reminded him.

  “That, too. No law against doing both, you know,” Duncan told her.

  “What if I don’t want to knock off any steam?” she challenged.

  He shook his head. “Well, seeing that you’re wound up tighter than anyone I’ve ever met, if you don’t let off any steam, then you’re going to just blow up someday.” Because the din was growing, he leaned into her and said, “You don’t want that happening.” She looked far from won over, so he added, “You’ve got a little girl to raise.”

  “And you’d be the expert on that. Raising a daughter,” she said when he raised a quizzical eyebrow at her comeback.

  Instead of being put off, he took her words in stride. “Maybe not specifically, but I’m pretty much of an expert on being part of a family and how things devolve when the dynamics change for the worse.”

  Duncan paused for a moment, debating just how much to say as he moved about the dance area with her. He decided she’d probably find out eventually, so he might as well use the story to make a point.

  “My mother died when I was a kid. Still had a father, still had siblings and more cousins, aunts and uncles than any three average kids, but I missed her. I felt the lack of her in my life. Actually, I still do,” he concluded.

  Noelle felt awkward in the face of the unexpected revelation. She wasn’t very good when it came to expressing sympathy, even though he had relayed the information to her rather casually.

  Because, despite the music, there was a stillness hanging between them she felt she had to say something. “I’m sorry you lost your mother,” she murmured. “But at least you had one.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “I thought you did, too.”

  “Oh, I did,” she agreed. “Had a father, too. But mostly in name only.” Her mouth curved ruefully. “I got in the way of their travel plans. They kept leaving me with Lucy whenever they went out of town and picking me up when they got back.” She shrugged, gazing off at nothing in particular. “One day, they just conveniently forgot to pick me up. I lived with Lucy after that.” This time her smile was genuine. “Turned out better that way for everyone. Lucy liked feeling useful and I stopped feeling as if I was always in the way. And my parents felt free again,” she added as an afterthought.

  He decided she could use a change of subject. “Melinda seems like an adjusted, happy little girl,” he observed.

  Her face softened as she thought of her daughter. “Thank you. She is. I couldn’t have done that without my parents,” she confided.

  He drew his head back and looked at her, puzzled. That didn’t make any sense. “I thought you said—”

  She was quick to explain her thinking. “I just remember everything they did and then I do the opposite. If I want an actual role model, I just look to Lucy. The song stopped,” she announced abruptly.

  To her surprise, Duncan didn’t loosen his hold on her. “It’s like a city bus in a metropolitan area,” he said easily. “There’ll be another one right along.” The small band his uncle had hired began to play again. Duncan smiled. “Ah, see, what did I say?”

  The tempo was exceedingly languid. “It’s a slow dance,” Noelle pointed out.

  “Good. Less dancing required on your part.” He looked into her face and his smile seemed to engulf her. “Not that you don’t dance a lot better than you think you do. You probably do a lot of things better than you give yourself credit for,” he guessed.

  Noelle felt a strange queasiness starting in her stomach and rippling all through her.

  Pep talk notwithstanding, she felt herself all but melting against him. There was something hot and potentially unmanageable growing in direct proportion to her closeness to him.

  She silently lectured herself. Reacting to Cavanaugh, in any manner, shape or form except strictly professionally had absolutely no future for her.

  She was well aware of that.

  Besides, she’d gone this long, more than six years, without so much as even feeling a vague tingle in response to a man.

  So what was going on with her now?

  Why him?

  Because you haven’t been in a situation that could be described as even remotely social since Christopher’s death. Right now you’re half-dressed, pressed up against a hard body and swaying to the music while his arms are around you. You haven’t been pronounced dead yet, so what do you expect?

  “Is that a private conversation or can anyone join in?” Duncan asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  Caught off guard, Noelle blinked, drawing her head back to look at him. “What?”

  “That conversation you’re obviously having in your head. I can almost feel it going on against my shoulder. I was just wondering if you were going to keep it to yourself or share at least some of it with the class,” her partner teased.

  “No private conversation,” she denied. Because he was waiting for some sort of an explanation, she grabbed at the first one she could think of. “I’m just wondering why you’re not dancing with someone else.”

  “Why should I find someone else when I’m perfectly happy with the partner I have?” he asked. It tickled him to see a bit of color creeping up along her collarbone. “So tell me, Detective O’Banyon, what other hidden talents do you have?”

  “Hidden talents?” she echoed. She shook her head, not getting his meaning.

  “Well, you dance better than just okay,” he said, “you’re very loyal to your family, make a great mother from what I can see and you clean up really well. I was just wondering if there’s anything else I should know about you.”

  Flirting. He was flirting with her. She couldn’t believe it. Didn’t the man know better? “I did very well in my martial arts classes,” she told him by way of a warning.

  The warning didn’t go far. “You did? How about that? Me, too,” he said cheerfully. “We should have an all-out match sometime, see who wins.” He made it sound as if he would relish the confrontation. She didn’t know if he was putting her on—or if he was serious.

  The one thing she did know was that she couldn’t appear to back off. So her eyes met his and she told him, “Sounds good to me.”

  But when Duncan smiled into her eyes and said in a lowered, sensual voice, “Me, too,” Noelle did back off, thinking that if she went any further with this proposal to match their martial arts skills, she might be biting off more than she could chew.

  Failure was not an option she relished. And with him, she knew she’d never live it down.

  This time, when the music stopped, she deliberately slipped her hands from his. “I’d better go check on Lucy and Melinda.”

  Duncan quickly caught her hand as the band began to play yet another song. “Your daughter’s obviously having fun and I have a hunch that Lucy wouldn’t take kindly to her granddaughter checking up on her, especially since she and my grandfather’s brother haven’t stopped talking to each other and laug
hing like a couple of college kids in the last hour.”

  Noelle looked first where her daughter was playing with about eleven other children and then over toward Lucy, who was sitting on a swing with the man Duncan had introduced to her as his late grandfather’s brother, Shamus. Everyone seemed rather contented to be exactly where they were.

  Like you, a voice in her head said.

  No, not like her, Noelle silently insisted. She did what she could to resist both the voice and the thought it was promoting. Because she wasn’t contented. She couldn’t allow herself to be. Contentment made you drop your guard and allowed you to be at your most vulnerable.

  She’d been vulnerable more times than she cared to recall and the sensation was highly overrated—not to mention rather dangerous to both her state of mind and her body, since things happened to her when she was vulnerable. Sad, soul-numbing things she didn’t want to be put in a position to experience again.

  She needed to keep her guard up, Noelle told herself firmly. Otherwise, who knew what was going to go wrong next?

  She didn’t want to find out.

  Abruptly, before the band stopped playing, she pulled her hands from his.

  He saw the strange look in her eyes. Was that fear? Her? He had to be imagining things. He had already learned that his partner could be pretty gutsy.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she answered.

  “We’re the only ones on the dance floor standing still,” he pointed out. “That qualifies as something being wrong in my book.”

  “I just suddenly need some punch,” Noelle explained, grasping at the first excuse she could think of.

  Rather than talk her out of it or laugh at her flimsy excuse, Duncan surprised her by going along with it.

  “Okay, then let’s ‘suddenly’ go get some punch,” he said gamely. Taking her hand, he led her from the dance floor toward the table where he’d left their glasses. The half-empty glasses were still there.

  “Ah, nice to know you can still count on some things,” Duncan said, turning around with a glass in each hand. “Just where we left them.”

  “Which one’s mine?” she asked, looking from one glass to the other. They both contained approximately the same amount of punch.

  Duncan looked at the glasses he held in his hands. “Why should that matter?” he asked her. “Mine wasn’t spiked and the last time around, the department doctor gave me a clean bill of health so I don’t have anything you can catch—unless you have something I can catch. Do you have any communicable diseases?” he said brightly.

  She found the very suggestion appalling and made no effort to hide that. “No!”

  “Then fine.” He held out the two glasses to her. “Pick your poison—so to speak.”

  She shook her head, rejecting both glasses. “I think I’ll just go get a fresh glass of punch if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” he answered her amicably. “But I am a little curious about what you’re afraid of, O’Banyon.”

  What she was “afraid of,” Noelle realized, was that if she drank out of his glass, it would amount to being one step closer to intimacy. It would be too much like her lips touching his and that would be breaching a barrier she didn’t want to cross.

  Noelle sighed, pressing her lips together.

  She might not want to have her barriers breached, but at the same time, she’d always been the kid who took dares, the woman who met each and every challenge head-on. The fastest way to get her to do something was to say that she couldn’t do it or that she would fail ignobly in the attempt.

  With Duncan’s question about fear still ringing in her ears, she turned on her heel and marched back to her partner. Taking the glass out of his right hand, Noelle drained what was left in it.

  Then, for good measure, she took the glass he had in his other hand. Tilting it back, she drained that glass, as well.

  She thrust both glasses back into his hands. “Satisfied?”

  “Well, not really,” he admitted, keeping a straight face. “Now I don’t have anything to drink. Guess we’ll have to get two fresh glasses after all,” he said cheerfully, walking by her as he made his way to the closest refreshment table.

  Staring after his departing back, Noelle shook her head. She was letting him get to her and she didn’t even know why—or how to keep it from happening on an ongoing basis.

  * * *

  “Here, let me have her,” Lucy urged, holding her arms out for her great-granddaughter.

  It was a little past ten o’clock and Duncan had driven them back to Noelle’s house. Though she’d tried very hard to keep her eyes opened, Melinda had finally lost the battle and fallen asleep—hard. So hard that she hadn’t woken up as Duncan carefully got her out of her car seat and then carried her into the house.

  “I can carry Melinda upstairs,” Noelle’s grandmother told him. With a warm smile she added, “You’ve done more than enough for the O’Banyon women today. I just want you to know that I had a lovely time.”

  After she gently removed the sleeping child from his arms, Lucy kissed the top of Melinda’s head and began to head for the stairs.

  Taking care of her daughter was her job, Noelle thought, snapping to attention. Certainly not a task to be delegated.

  “She’s too heavy for you, Lucy,” Noelle protested. “I’ll take her.”

  “She’s not too heavy yet. So unless you want to turn this child into a tug-of-war toy, I suggest you let me have my way.” her grandmother argued. “Thanks again,” she said, tossing the words over her shoulder toward Duncan just before she began to climb up the stairs.

  Duncan stood at the foot of the staircase for a minute, watching the woman ascend with her sleeping great-granddaughter in her arms. Lucy moved like the very embodiment of strength, he couldn’t help thinking. The woman was nothing if not admirably capable.

  “Your grandmother’s really something else,” he told Noelle as he moved away from the stairs.

  He wasn’t about to get an argument from her. “Don’t I know it,” Noelle agreed with a laugh. “But what she just said goes double for me,” she went on to tell him. He cocked his head, silently asking her to elaborate. So she did. “Thanks for today. Lucy and Melinda both had an absolute ball.”

  “How about you?” he asked as he made his way back to the front door with Noelle shadowing his steps. “What did you have?”

  Several quips came to mind as a response, but she refrained from saying any of them. He deserved the truth if nothing else.

  “Fun,” she finally answered, and as the word left her lips, she realized how true that actually was. She’d had fun, just pure fun. As had Melinda and Lucy. And she knew she had him to thank for that. “You have a really nice family.”

  Duncan nodded. “Yeah, which is pretty fortunate because I don’t think I can give them back at this point. I’ve gotten too much mileage out of them.” Reaching the door, he turned around to face her and paused for a moment. “It was nice hearing you laugh,” he said. “You should do it more often.”

  Noelle shrugged self-consciously. She didn’t know how to handle compliments. She didn’t get them much in her line of work.

  “Our job’s not funny,” she pointed out.

  “Humor is really important. It’s what sees us through the worst of any situation. You lose your sense of humor, the bad guys win. Think about it,” he urged when he saw the skeptical look blossom on her face.

  “Yeah, well, I will think about it,” she promised, then felt compelled to ask, “Um, do you want a nightcap or anything?” She felt that she needed to offer him something in exchange for the invitation to Brennan’s wedding he’d bestowed on her and hers.

  For a moment, Duncan was sorely tempted, not by the offer, but for the excuse to
linger a little longer with this softer, more amicable version of his partner. But then he glanced at his wristwatch. The hour hand was flirting with eleven. He needed to call it a night—and so did she.

  “Thanks, but it’s getting late and I’ve got a full day ahead of me tomorrow. You probably do, too.”

  She nodded at his excuse as she put her hand on the doorknob and turned it. “Thanks again for inviting us.”

  “Thanks again for coming,” Duncan countered.

  Then, to Noelle’s surprise, he leaned in and brushed a kiss against her cheek. “See you Monday,” he told her just before he walked away.

  Noelle stood there in the open doorway, watching her partner as he made his way down the front walk to his vehicle, got into it and then drove off.

  She stood there as Duncan’s six-year-old white sedan became progressively smaller and smaller, then disappeared as he made a right-hand turn two streets down to leave the development.

  And she remained there longer than that. She stood there, riveted, until the area where his lips had touched her skin finally ceased throbbing and the warmth finally, finally started to fade away.

  Only then did she close the door and go up to her room.

  Chapter 8

  For the most part, Noelle had always prided herself on the fact that she was always on time, if not early, to everything. This included foremost her job, any appointment she might have, as well as the occasional lunch date she made to meet friends.

  As a rule, she didn’t like to be kept waiting and hated to be the person who kept anyone else waiting. Punctuality was a mainstay in her life.

  Unless something unforeseen came up to delay her.

  Like this morning.

  She’d started out this morning the way she did every morning, by leaving early. This despite the fact that she’d had less than an acceptable amount of sleep. Her grandmother, still riding high on the day she had spent with the Cavanaugh family, most notably their patriarch, Shamus, had spent both Saturday night and Sunday night at her house rather than driving home to her small apartment. Still hyped up on enthusiasm, Lucy had talked a blue streak, reiterating her conversation with Shamus practically verbatim with added sidebars, comments and opinions on everything and anything that had transpired from the moment they had set foot on the Cavanaugh grounds.